Today marked the beginning of the conference! However, since the conference began in the evening I had the daytime free to explore more of Montreal. I met my friend Elena (who I used to volunteer with at a hospital back home) for coffee. She is currently a nursing student at McGill, and it was so cool to hear about her experience at McGill so far and to catch up after a few years. After we filled up on coffee, we headed north to explore the Mont-Royal!
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| After climbing up the steep road towards the park, I looked back and saw this beautiful scene. Many of the buildings at the base of the park are McGill offices, classrooms, or student residences. According to Elena, McGill is quite spread out, which makes having classes in different buildings quite the challenge to get to (especially if it requires an uphill walk to get to class!) |
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| And the stairs have begun! This part of the walk reminded me of the Grouse Grind in Vancouver. This walk, however, was a lot shorter than the Grouse Grind! It took only around 30 minutes to reach the top, but it did remind me that I need to invest more into my cardio... |
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| The view from the top was well worth the steep walk. The cylindrical building just left of center is where most of the McGill medical school classes take place. Having class on a hill is an excellent way to ensure students stay fit! |
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| Here are Elena and I at the top of the Mont-Royal. The weather was absolutely beautiful - there was hardly a cloud in sight. Thank you, BRCA Symposium, for taking place during the spring and not the winter. Montreal had temperatures around below 30 this past winter - yikes! |
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| Once at the top of the mountain there is a long path that leads to a beautiful man-made lake called Beaver Lake. There were lots of people sunbathing on the rolling hills that led to the lake. We joined in and enjoyed the crystal blue water in front of us. I could have stayed there for hours! |
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Beaver Lake, everyone! Although it's difficult to see in this picture, there were quite a few birds going for a swim in the pristine water. The shimmering water was a sight to behold, and I'm so thankful for Elena introducing me to the Mont Royal! Fun fact: Montreal was initially called Ville-Marie, and was later named Montreal based on the Mont Royal. Also, did you know that Montreal is an island?
After a much easier walk down the mountain I headed to my hotel room to freshen up for the evening's proceedings! After a nice shower and some dinner I headed to the Centre Mont Royal and checked in at the registration table. I sipped some complimentary coffee as I browsed the tables near registration. Did you know that LifeLabs (more commonly known for blood work) offers panel and specific gene testing? I chatted with the representative and he explained that it's relatively new. |
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| After checking in and picking up lots of brochures at the various tables, we all headed into the presentation room to hear the first three talks of the conference. Tonight's talks served as an introduction to the conference and provided the necessary information to ensure that everyone was on the same page. This included a talk on gene nomenclature, one on massively parallel sequencing, and a final talk on the link between DNA repair genes and Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Syndrome (HBOC). The first talk was by Dr. Lawrence Brody, who dove into why gene nomenclature is important and how it can be best used in clinical practice. He emphasized that we should move away from calling changes in the genetic code "mutations," since this implies that the change is bad, while some changes are benign. A better term is "variant," as this reflects that a change has occurred without the implicit association with pathogenicity. Dr. Britta Weigelt from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center then discussed massively parallel sequencing, which was a great refresher from genetics. It is always satisfying to hear a talk where lots of words are familiar! She discussed driver versus passenger gene mutations and the evolution of sequencing from Sanger to next generation sequencing, another term for massively parallel sequencing. Lastly, Dr. Alvaro Monteiro discussed a question I have wondered for a while: why do mutations in BRCA1/2 confer elevated risk specifically for breast and ovarian cancer? Since these genes are expressed in every single cell, why do these specific tissues show a heightened vulnerability to cancer development? The short answer is that researchers don't know for sure yet. One hypothesis suggests that survival factors present in these tissues may enable mutated cells to proliferate. Other hypotheses focus on hormones such as estrogen, but many doctors and researchers are still searching for the true answer. |
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This evening was a great introduction to the conference. My camera couldn't quite capture the words on the bright slide above, but I hope to take some more tomorrow! Looking forward to a full day of talks and my poster presentation tomorrow!
~ Vivienne |
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